Riding Trax- Maddy Oritt

After our first walkabout and our subsequent presentation day, I find myself being more observant when I walk around the city. This could also be partly because, as a student at the U, the vast majority of my time is spent on campus, as opposed to when I was in high school and had a car and more reason to be out and about in the city. Because I'm on campus so much, being off campus and in downtown SLC feels more foreign than it did just a couple of months ago. I feel in some ways that I'm seeing old things with new eyes.

Today, I Traxed to and from Gateway with a couple friends to see a movie. Trax is one of the few places/things that encompasses and welcomes all manner of people from all over the city and beyond. There are so many characters, so it is impossible to get bored. The people we saw on our two rides today included a studious young Asian man, two grungy men dressed too young for their (perceived) age, a middle-aged Asian woman helping a severely disabled older Caucasian man, a handful of Dew tour spectators, an American Indian-looking man with a long, dark ponytail and a lovely complexion, and an older gentleman sitting on a seat next to me. He asked me whether we were students at the University, to which I responded yes, and then asked if we were from Utah, to which I answered yes again. He then commented that we were really special to be able to attend school here. He seemed incredulous that we could attend school in our home state, which was a bit perplexing... Even though some of the people on the trains can be somewhat off-putting or even scary at times, I can also appreciate the small slice of diversity we can observe on public transportation. And it makes me smile to remind myself that if I think our public transportation system attracts interesting and diverse people, it is nothing compared to the people I might find on public transportation in a much larger urban area, such as New York or Chicago!